How it all began

Welcome to the Rockers & Rollers blog!

I began thinking about creating Rockers & Rollers many years ago, and I’m so delighted to see it finally coming to fruition. This blog is where I’ll share my thoughts and experiences as the game goes from its current state (play testing, refinement, layout, and crowdfunding) to the finished product.

It all began with a flash of inspiration during a period when I was doing a lot of research about roleplaying game design. I was running a 5E D&D campaign (a highly modified Curse of Strahd) but was reading a lot of game systems and trying to decide what to play next. The Strahd campaign had hit what I call the “boring middle,” when the players were all 6th or 7th level and combat was getting longer and more complicated. I was growing weary of 5E, too, and looking for something that was less complex, looser, and just more fun.

First a little background. I started playing D&D in 1979 (yes, I am old). During a Boy Scout camping trip, a guy named Steve said he had brought a new game, and asked if I wanted to play. He proceeded to pull out the blue-box Dungeons and Dragons set, and when he dropped the dice on the table, I was hooked.

I was so awestruck by the experience of playing a cleric and fighting monsters in a dungeon that I went home after that camping trip and wrote down as many rules as I could remember. It was nearly impossible to find copies of Dungeons & Dragons rules in any form, so I ran a game for a couple of friends based entirely on memory and my scattershot notes.

When I finally found a hobby store that stocked the boxed set, I bought it. The only piece of that set I have left is my original orange 6-sided die.

My O.G. 6-sided die from my Dungeons & Dragons basic set (blue box).

I played through high school, and even started a D&D club. But my interests were turning elsewhere, to girls and beer, and during the ‘80s girls, as a rule, were not so into fantasy roleplaying games. So after I established the club I largely abandoned it, though I’m still happy to have that on my nerd résumé.

Me and my big hair, circa 1982, as what the school newspaper writer called the “Dragon Master.”

I played here and there during my later years of high school, but spent more time creating adventures than actually playing them (again: girls and beer). One product of that time period is an adventure called “The Tomb of Areopagus the Cloaked and Japheth of the Mighty Staff,” which was later published in a collection of home-brewed modules from the 1980s by Tim Hutchings called “The Habitition [sic] of the Stone Giant Lord (and other adventures from our shared youth).”

Available from Tim Hutchings Makes Games: https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/collections/basic-book-selection/products/habitition-of-the-stone-giant-lord

I played a little more D&D in college, but largely stopped playing RPGs until I was in my late 20s-early 30s, and got the itch again. That itch was fully scratched when I got a job as a graphic designer for The Armory, a game wholesaler in my hometown of Baltimore. For a nerd, working in the Armory (which went under the official name of The Armory Museum of Military History—apparently, calling it a museum was a tax write-off or something) was an absolute dream.

The Armory sold every kind of war- and roleplaying game that existed, from crunchy Avalon Hill boardgames to the latest roleplaying titles, miniatures, scenery, and metric tons of dice. I would spend time in the enormous warehouse checking out all the latest games and supplements: Dungeons & Dragons, of course, but also Call of Cthulhu, Glorantha, Top Secret, Tunnels and Trolls, Judges Guild, Warhammer, Gamma World, GURPS, Chill, Traveler, weird one-offs like The Rocky & Bullwinkle game … it was overwhelming and glorious. I used my discount to pick up lots of games, but—and I’m embarrassed to admit it—I also used my “five-finger” discount on nights when I was stuck working late. Mea culpa.

I’ve always been a horror fan, so I ran Chill and then got deeply into Call of Cthulhu, running a modern-era campaign that lasted about a year. I also ran a 4th edition D&D campaign in fits and spurts.

And then I fell in love, got married, had kids, and being a game master was basically impossible. I wrote a couple of novels, a bunch of short stories, and all of my creativity and spare time went into writing fiction.

But I still loved reading roleplaying games and thinking about them. In 2019, with my kids entering their teens and a little extra free time, I bought the 5E rulebooks, put out a call for players, and started the aforementioned Curse of Strahd campaign. It was deliriously fun, though we only managed to play once a month at best. When the pandemic hit, we easily transitioned to online play. But I missed our in-person sessions, and still believe there’s nothing like sitting around a real table.

And as I already mentioned, I found our sessions were bogging down. And just managing the game took hours, including keeping everything updated in a database so I could track all the NPCs, plot developments, and the minutiae required to run such a complex scenario (not to mention that I was working with numerous home-brew modifications gleaned from the CoS subreddit). It was exhausting.

So I started looking at other games. I ended the Strahd campaign (much to my players’ dismay) and ran a few sessions of Dungeon Crawl Classics. It was fun, but it didn’t stick. I bought maybe a dozen games I was hoping to try, including Star Trek, Blades in the Dark, Alien, Hillfolk, and others I have since forgotten. And then I bought the Dungeon World paperback rulebook, and everything changed.

Next: How I discovered Powered by the Apocalypse